Harry Lieberman | Atavist Magazine | March 2024 | 1,897 words (7 minutes)
This is an excerpt from the issue. 149, “The devil has descended on Georgia.”.”
In May 1991, Michael Jordan visited Atlanta, Georgia to enjoy the city’s social scene. Jordan, a 21-year-old who lived in Florida, came on vacation and ended up in an area called Midtown. If there’s a gay mecca in the Deep South, Midtown is it. The bar there was legendary. The busiest spots were his brick-walled diving spot, “Phoenix,” and his sprawling three-story building, “Gallus,” a private house turned piano bar, restaurant, and hustler hangout. “is. Piedmont Park, located northeast of Midtown, was a popular cruising spot thanks to the privacy afforded by dense vegetation. There were cars lined up with license plates from as far away as California and Michigan. Local residents complained about the traffic, and arborists installed fencing to “protect” the trees. One police officer once told a reporter that the park was “so crowded with gay men that you thought you were watching a drive-in movie.”
Note: This story contains graphic depictions of sexual violence.
But Midtown’s freedom and fun had its limits. Sodomy is illegal in Georgia, and police regularly detained gay men, sometimes going undercover and posing as hustlers. “One TV station was scrolling through the names of all the people who had been arrested for soliciting sodomy,” recalls Cliff Bostock, a longtime Atlanta journalist. With the HIV/AIDS crisis nearing its apex and a positive test almost certainly a death sentence, some Americans, especially in the South, believe gay men deserve to be gay. Ta. Charles Stanley, a prominent Atlanta preacher, made national headlines in 1986 when he declared that the epidemic was “God’s displeasure” with homosexuality.
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On the evening of May 12, his first day in New York, Jordan was wandering around Midtown when a man in a white Lincoln Town Car approached him and asked if he wanted to make some money. “What do I have to do?” Jordan answered. He said the man was doing research and he was willing to pay Jordan $50 to drink the vodka. “I’ll be taking notes as I watch you get more and more inebriated,” the man said. Jordan jumped at the chance to make some easy cash and agreed to meet the man at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Juniper Street.
Jordan was already there when the man arrived. The man motioned for Jordan to get into the car, handed him a fifth of vodka and told him to drink it quickly. Jordan drank about half the bottle, at which point the man left the car for several minutes to get something to mix the alcohol with. When he returned, the man asked Jordan to masturbate hard because he wanted to see him masturbate. Mr Jordan said he was too drunk to get sober quickly. He then drank more alcohol and passed out.
Early the next morning, a man named David Atkins found a person curled up in a fetal position on the ground in the parking lot behind the Ponce de Leon Hotel, where Atkins worked as a clerk. “At first I thought he was about 30 to 35 years old and very dirty. I poked him with my foot and told him to wake up,” Atkins said. southern voice, Atlanta’s gay newspaper. “Then I realized he had blisters all over his body and he was still a child.”
Jordan was on the ground. He was naked, his genitals wrapped in rubber bands and set on fire. The burns extended to his buttocks and legs, and his nose and mouth were filled with blood.
Atkins called 911 and Jordan was taken by ambulance to the hospital, where he would remain for a month. Because police were slow to respond to the scene, Atkins contacted Kathy Woolard, a gay rights activist who works with the ACLU’s Georgia chapter. Woolard took immediate action and contacted the police investigator in charge of the case. In her words, she was “just running around.” Based on the victim’s profile, police labeled the attack a bias crime. Woolard felt they were not taking the case seriously for the same reason.
Woolard urged law enforcement to speak with a potential witness, Phoenix bartender Bill Adamson. Adamson said Jordan described coming to the bar before going to Fifth and Juniper and having a conversation with an unknown man in his Town Car. Ms Adamson warned: “Please stay away from him. He is dangerous.”
Adamson didn’t know the driver’s name, only that people around Midtown called him Handcuff Man. He was a serial offender who approached gay men, offered to pay them for drinks, then beat them or set them on fire and left them for dead. Sometimes he would handcuff his victims to a pole, giving him his sinister nickname.
One man said he narrowly escaped the handcuffed man, and there are rumors that some of the victims may not have survived. However, some thought it was just an urban legend. Jordan’s assault brings the truth to light. Not only was the man in handcuffs there, but there were people in Atlanta who knew his name, including law enforcement officials. Apparently the reason he wasn’t caught was because no one was really trying to catch him.
That was about to change.
no one could be sure when the handcuffed man made his first attack. Adamson claimed to have been terrorizing Midtown since the late 1960s, driving a white Lincoln, being about 5 feet 10 inches tall, with dark hair and glasses. One sex worker said a man in handcuffs picked him up in Piedmont Park in 1977, asked him for a shot of alcohol, and then assaulted him. The victim managed to escape with a stab wound to the shoulder, but later saw the man again in the park staring at other male hustlers. He did not report the crime for fear of being exposed to his loved ones.
In 1984, a few years after becoming a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Susan Faludi, then a 20-something reporter, wrote a front-page article for a newspaper about a gay hustler. atlanta Magazine composition. She asked sources about the dangers of their lifestyle, saying, “The biggest fear on the streets right now is the ghost of the ‘handcuff man.” He’s the guy offering you a pint.” He was given sleeping pills, then handcuffed and beaten. ”
The following year, in April 1985, a thin man rolled down his car window on Ponce de Leon Avenue and asked Max Schrader if he wanted to make some money. Schrader, 21, has been hustling since he was 13, pulling tricks on men both public and covert alike, including a married Baptist preacher. He knew what he did was dangerous. Someone pointed a gun at him and a female sex worker friend of his was killed. “They found her head in one trash can and her arms in another trash can,” Schrader said. “She was a good person.” Schroeder knew the handcuffed man who attacked another friend. But the man in the car on Ponce Street, as the thoroughfare is commonly known, did not appear to be a predator. He wore glasses and a pressed shirt. he looked normal.
The man asked Schrader to have drinks with him, and Schrader agreed. But after a while he started to feel strange. Had the man let something slip? Schrader fell to the ground. “Please don’t hurt me!” he begged as the man pulled him into the car.
The man drove to a wooded area, parked, and dragged an inebriated Schrader into a kudzu field. He then poured the liquid on Schrader’s crotch and lit a match, lighting it up in his face in a brutal way Schrader would never forget. When the man dropped a match, Schrader caught fire.
Schrader lay in the woods for hours, slipping in and out of consciousness. When he had the strength, he cried out for help. Around 9:30 p.m., a man who happened to be a nurse was driving home with his girlfriend when he spotted a naked figure on the side of the road. The nurse stopped, saw Schrader’s condition, rushed home, called the police, and got a blanket to wrap Schrader in. “I think God sent him,” Schrader said.
Mr. Schrader was taken to Grady Memorial Hospital, the same hospital that Michael Jordan would go to six years later. He stayed there for six weeks, during which time the police came to see him once. They left a business card and told me to call if I wanted to talk. He misplaced his card and was never contacted by police again.
Schrader wasn’t surprised. Atlanta police seemed more interested in harassing and arresting gay people than in protecting them. He sometimes wrote down numbers on license plates in Piedmont Park and threatened drivers who feared his sexual orientation would be revealed. Doing so could cost your family, your job, and even your life. Gay-bashing cases often remained unsolved, even if they were investigated. etcAn Atlanta gay and lesbian magazine reported that at least 18 gay men died at the hands of unknown assailants between 1984 and 1986. The publication complained that police have “little understanding” of homophobic crimes. The Atlanta Gay Center began offering sensitivity training to police officers, but the response was mixed. “I think what you’ve told us will be helpful in the long run, and I think it should be expressed more often in police work. But I still think that homosexuals are disgusting and that our country… Atlanta Public Safety Commissioner George Knapper declined to issue a statement condemning the crimes against the gay community.
After two years of healing, Schrader’s scars and all are back to normal. He grew up poor, so selling sex was the only way he ever made money. At least now he knew what a man in handcuffs was like and could avoid him.
J.D. Kirkland also suspected that he had seen the handcuffed man’s face. Kirkland, an Atlanta police officer, worked security at the Gallus several nights a week. According to Don Honeywell, one of Gallus’ owners, Kirkland was a combination of Dirty Harry and the Sheriff. gunsmoke– “A strong-willed cowboy-type police officer.” In his free time, he trained horses on a vast property on the outskirts of the city and worked on a novel about a time-traveling police officer. Kirkland was married and had children. Although he was not gay, he was considerate towards Gallus’ customers. “He really cared,” Honeywell said. “I don’t think he was critical of what they were doing at all.” (Kirkland died in 1996.)
Users had told Kirkland about the man in handcuffs, including his physical appearance, and on November 4, 1983, a man matching that description came to Gallus. Kirkland filed a trespass report and took a Polaroid photo of the man. The Gallus family had a “forbidden book” full of photos of people who were not allowed on the property. Bartenders were supposed to check it at the start of their shift so they could kick out prohibited patrons. Kirkland included a photo of the man in the book.
Before kicking him out for good, Mr. Kirkland asked for his name. The man said he was Robert Lee Bennett Jr. and added, “I’m a lawyer. I’m going to sue you.”